Learning through Play:
Overview
Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
2
Connections to Aistear and
Síolta
Aistear
Themes: Well-being, Identity and Belonging,
Communicating, Exploring and Thinking
Guidelines for good practice: Learning and
developing through play (pp.52-70)
Síolta Standards
1: Rights of the Child, C1.1, 1.2, 1.3
6: Play, C6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 6.6, 6.7
Research Digests linked to the above Standards
The Aistear Síolta Practice Guide is intended
to help you in your role as curriculumdeveloper to build, reflect on and extend
your curriculum to support babies’, toddlers’
and young children’s early learning and
development. Drawing on the early childhood
sector’s experiences of using Aistear and
Síolta, the Practice Guide includes:
$ Curriculum Foundations and
$ six interconnected Curriculum Pillars:
1.
Building Partnerships with Parents
2.
Creating and Using the Learning
Environment
3.
Learning through Play
4.
Nurturing and Extending Interactions
5.
Planning and Assessing using Aistear’s
Themes
6.
Supporting Transitions.
This document gives an overview of the pillar,
Learning through Play. This pillar has a range
of resources to help you support and enable
children to learn through play in your setting.
Before working with this pillar, we
recommend you work on Curriculum
Foundations.
Why focus on learning
through play?
Aistear and Síolta highlight the important
role of play in children’s lives and provide
ideas and suggestions to support learning and
development through play. Time, resources
and support from practitioners all help
children to maximise their fun in, and their
learning and development through play.
Learning through Play is one of the pillars
in the Aistear Síolta Practice Guide. It has
connections to the other pillars, Building
Partnership with Parents, Creating and
Using the Learning Environment, Nurturing
and Extending Interactions, Planning
and Assessing using Aistear’s Themes,
and Supporting Transitions. This short
introduction reminds us why learning through
play is important, gives a brief overview of
the set of resources in this part of the Practice
Guide and provides suggestions on how you
might use these.
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
Aistear‘s principle on play and hands-on
experiences says,
Much of children’s early learning and
development takes place through play and
hands-on experiences. Through these,
children explore social, physical and
imaginary worlds. These experiences help
them to manage their feelings, develop
as thinkers and language users, develop
socially, be creative and imaginative and
lay the foundations for becoming effective
communicators and learners
(Principles and themes, 2009, p.11).
Similarly, Síolta’s principle on play
acknowledges that,
Play is an important medium through which
the child interacts with, explores and makes
sense of the world around her/him. These
interactions with, for example, other children,
adults, materials, events and ideas are key
to the child’s well-being, development and
learning. Play is a source of joy and fulfilment
3
for the child. It provides an important context
and opportunity to enhance and optimise
quality early childhood experiences. As such,
play will be a primary focus in quality early
childhood settings (2006, p.9).
Standard 6 of Síolta, Play, highlights the
importance of each child having ample time
to engage in freely available and accessible,
developmentally appropriate and wellresourced opportunities for exploration,
creativity and ‘meaning making’ in the
company of other children, with participating
and supportive adults, and alone. Aistear’s
guidelines, Learning and developing through
play (pp.54- 70) provide information on play
including its characteristics as shown in Table
1 below.
The guidelines also highlight the adult’s key
role in planning, supporting and reviewing
play as well as in organising for, and resourcing
play. A list of resources for different types of
play is included in Appendix 1 (pp.103-106).
Table 1 : Characteristics of play
Characteristic
Description
Active
Children use their bodies and minds in their play. They interact with the environment,
with materials and with other people.
Adventerous and risky
Play helps children to explore the unknown. The pretend element offers a safety net that
encourages children to take risks.
Communicative
Children share information and knowledge through their play. Their communication can
be verbal or non-verbal, simple or complex.
Enjoyable
Play is fun and exciting and involves a sense of humour.
Involved
Children become deeply absorbed and focused in their play, concentrating and thinking
about what they are doing.
Meaningful
Children play about what they have seen and heard, and what they know. Play helps them
to build and extend their knowledge, understanding and skills in a way that makes sense
to them.
Sociable and interactive
Children play alongside or with others. Sometimes they also like and need to play alone.
Symbolic
Children imagine and pretend when they are playing. They try out ideas, feelings and
roles. They re-enact the past and rehearse the future. This can involve them ‘reading’
and ‘writing’ long before they develop these skills.
Therapeutic
Play helps children to express and work through emotions and experiences.
Voluntary
Children choose to play. Their play is spontaneous. They shape it as they go, changing the
characters, events, objects and locations.
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
4
Using the resources
in this pillar
As with all the pillars in the Practice Guide,
there are five categories of resources in
Learning through Play :
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Self-evaluation Tools
Examples and Ideas for Practice
Resources for Sharing
Action Planning Tools
Gallery.
Each category has resources to help you reflect
on your practice. You might like to look at the
Self-evaluation Tools first to help identify your
strengths in supporting children’s learning
and development through play as well as noting
changes you would like to make.
There are two of these tools:
•
•
one for practitioners working with
children birth-3 years
one for practitioners working with
children aged 3-6 years.
After this, you might be interested in looking at
examples and ideas from other practitioners.
You will find these in Learning Experiences
linked to Aistear’s themes, short podcasts,
photo presentations, video clips and practical
tip sheets in the sections, Examples and Ideas
for Practice and Resources for Sharing at
www.aistearsiolta.ie The Action Planning
Tools can then help you plan specific changes
you want to make in your setting. Finally, a
Gallery of captioned photos from a variety of
early childhood settings, offers additional ideas
about supporting learning through play. Table
2 below provides an overview of all resources
available in this pillar.
Table 2 : Resources in the Learning through Play pillar
Category and Purpose
Self-evaluation Tools
These provide prompts to help
practitioners reflect on their work
in order to identify successes and
challenges and to note changes
they would like to make.
Resource Title
Learning through Play: Self-evaluation Tool - Babies and
Toddlers(birth-3 years)
Learning through Play: Self-evaluation Tool - Young
Children (3-6 years)
This tool looks at three elements:
1.
The importance of play
2.
The practitioner’s role in supporting learning and
development through play 3.
Time and resources for play and playful activity.
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
5
Category and Purpose
Examples and Ideas for
Practice
These materials show examples
of how different early childhood
settings support learning through
play.
Resource Title
Podcasts and Photo Presentations
•
Learning environments for babies
•
Learning environments for toddlers
•
Creating outdoor environments for babies and toddlers
•
Creating challenging outdoor environments for 3-6
year olds
•
Playful routines and engaging interactions
(Birth-3 years)
•
Planning a play-based, emergent curriculum:
Gingerbread Man (2-3 years)
•
Planning a play-based, emergent curriculum: Old
MacDonald (1-2 years)
•
The links between play, learning and development
(3-6 years)
•
Making the most of play and learning (3-6 years)
•
Types of play including physical play (3-6 years)
•
Creative and language play (3-6 years)
•
Pretend play and games with rules (3-6 years)
•
Supporting children’s holistic development through
play (3-5 years)
•
Pedagogical interactions to support oral language
and early literacy development in play (3-6 years)
•
Supporting early mathematical abilities in play (3-6 years)
•
Using play in pre-school settings to think and talk
about measure (3-6 years)
•
Using books in pre-school settings to think and talk
about measure (3-6 years)
•
Supporting language development in the pre-school
year (3-6 years)
•
Reviewing and adapting the daily routine (3-6 years)
•
Supporting emergent literacy and numeracy: Making
shapes and symbols (3-6 years)
•
Supporting emergent literacy: The writing table (3-6 years)
•
Enriching play with the language of mathematics
•
Supporting emergent literacy and numeracy
•
Making adequate time for play
•
Supporting progression in play
•
Learning high quality mathematics through high
quality play
•
Play and an emergent and inquiry-based curriculum (Birth-6 years)
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
6
Category and Purpose
Examples and Ideas for
Practice
These materials show examples
of how different early childhood
settings support learning through
play.
Resource Title
Podcasts and Photo Presentations
•
How can play support self-regulation (3-6 years)
•
Why is play import for babies and toddlers
(Birth-3 years)
•
Why is play import for young children (3-6 years)
•
How can practitioners support children’s learning
through play (3-6 years)
•
How can parents and practitioners support children’s
self-regulation (Birth-6 years)
Video Clips (Birth-3 years)
•
Story-time Toddlers
•
Ice-cream car
•
The treasure basket
•
Pretend play: Toddlers’ spatial awareness
•
Pretend play: Toddlers dressing the dollies
•
Pretend play: Toddlers’ tea-time
•
Reading Old MacDonald
•
Nursery rhymes
Video Clips (3-6 years)
•
Making pancakes
•
Making shapes in the sand
•
Choosing to write during free-play
•
Solving a problem
•
Literacy and numeracy in the café
•
Counting cheese
•
My favourite things
•
Me and my body
•
Peer mentoring
•
Exploding interest in numbers
•
Mr Potato Head
•
Walking the plank
•
Playing with octons
•
Washing the bike
•
Dressing the baby
•
Story-time pre-schoolers
•
Walking on stilts
•
Learning about sinking and floating
•
Nurturing dispositions
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
7
Category and Purpose
Examples and Ideas for
Practice
These materials show examples
of how different early childhood
settings support learning through
play.
Resources for Sharing
These materials include tip
sheets for practitioners on
different aspects of learning
through play.
Resource Title
Learning Experiences (Birth-3 years)
•
Learning Experiences for babies, toddlers and young
children from Aistear’s guidelines
Learning Experiences (3-6 years)
•
Personal books
•
Warm Day
•
Hospital
•
Glengarra Wood
•
Shadows
•
The nurse’s visit
•
Babies
•
Posting letters
•
Trains
•
Hen
•
Ice
•
Feeding birds
•
Fire, fire
•
Reindeer visit
•
Sun flowers
•
Dinosaurs
Tip Sheets
•
Appendix 1: Resources for play
•
Play for babies (available in 7 languages)
•
Play for toddlers (available in 7 languages)
•
Play for young children (available in 7 languages)
•
Enjoying books with your baby
•
Enjoying books with your toddler
•
Suggested list of books to read with toddlers
•
Books that promote discussion with young children
•
Using a Treasure Basket with babies
•
Learning about measure (3-6 years)
•
Caregiving routines (Birth-3 years)
•
Enhancing language (Birth-3 years)
•
Enhancing language (3-6 years)
•
Open-ended materials
•
Fundamental movement skills (3-6 years)
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Aistear Síolta Practice Guide: Learning through Play
Category and Purpose
8
Resource Title
Action Planning Tools
A template is provided to help
practitioners plan for changes in
a particular area of their work in
supporting learning through play.
Learning through play: Action planning template
Gallery
Photos from a range of early
childhood settings offer
additional ideas about supporting
learning through play.
Gallery
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